The Draw-Render-Update Conspiracy

I love clear terminology. It’s the engineer in me. This post is about some self-perpetuating terminology that confused me as a new developer.

The confusion centers around functions named draw() or renderFoo().As a new developer, you get excited – “Ah hah!” you think to yourself, “I am about to see something cool go down here.” So you pop open the function, and it’s setting the x coordinate or changing a color on some other data structure. “WTF! There’s no drawing or rendering happening here!” you say, disgusted and confused. Or worse, you assume that changing those values has any immediate effect beyond altering a few bytes in memory – and ascribe magical behavior to that section of the code, corrupting your ability to understand and debug.

The reality, of course, is that the actual drawing – in terms of commands to change pixels on the screen – is happening elsewhere, deep in the bowels of some fanatically optimized inner loop (you hope). The draw() function is just updating some data that is used elsewhere. It’s not drawing anything, any more than telling your painter what color you want your bathroom is painting. That’s why I try to name them things like update().

But naming functions update() where the conspiracy gets ahold of me. I’ve already been disappointed by functions named draw and render, that don’t do either, for years. I’ve become cynical. “Well, everyone knows you don’t ACTUALLY render anything in your render function. It’s just a state update. It’s this code’s perspective on what rendering means.” And due to this etymological relativism, I write functions called renderToast that don’t really have anything to do with displaying charred bread products.

What’s the moral of this story? The trivial one is “name stuff accurately.” But the rot has already set in, and language is situational and metaphoric. So the real takeaway is for those who aren’t on the “inside” of the conspiracy, a warning – things aren’t always what they seem. Don’t trust that draw function until you really know what it is doing. Always read the whole codebase!

(And – OK, maybe it’s more of a stand alone complex than a conspiracy, if we want to be really specific.)

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